Hardware designers, particularly those working on blades or chassis, are currently faced with huge challenges. The needs of the communications network infrastructure, and next generation communications applications, are rapidly changing and cannot be served by existing solutions.
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs): Hardware system designers are facing major challenges meeting the needs of evolving markets such as telecommunications and high-performance computing. Application performance and energy efficiency requirements are escalating, as is the need for flexible solutions that can adapt to evolving standards and market needs. Design complexity has soared, creating severe challenges in managing design and verification costs, time-to-market, and overall system performance and power consumption. Increasingly, hardware designers have turned to FPGAs instead of microprocessors or Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to meet their design needs. Microprocessors, while fully programmable, can provide the required flexibility, and because a given product is customized through software, they address the time-to-market constraints. However, microprocessor solutions often fail to provide sufficient performance and energy efficiency to meet product requirements. ASICs, on the other hand, while capable of providing high performance and energy efficiency, are expensive to design (requiring many months or years) and therefore often fall short of time-to-market requirements and may be too expensive to develop.
FPGAs have evolved from simple logic fabrics used as glue logic concentrators to multi-million-gate programmable systems-on-a-chip used as ASIC and micro-processor replacements. They have been used in a wide variety of applications, from flexible network routing components, to high-performance general purpose computing devices, to special purpose signal processors. Driven by Moore's Law, ever-larger FPGAs are being used in a widening range of applications with ever-increasing functional requirements, and with the need for additional system-level resources (such as memory and input/output devices) and support for operating systems and integrated development environments. Meeting these requirements requires innovative ways to architect and package FPGA systems.
A common approach to addressing the engineering of FPGA-based platforms to meet the application functional requirements is to start with a conventional computer chassis and motherboard with expansion slots, and to add in a FPGA-equipped board and the appropriate set of boards for input/output. If additional resources are needed, multiple boxes can be connected together using any of the common networking methods, such as Ethernet or Infiniband. There are many deficiencies to this approach:
1. Because of internal bus limitations and limits on the number of expansion slots, in-box communication bandwidth is limited, creating bottlenecks between the FPGA(s), I/O, memory, and CPU(s).
2. Excessive delays between boxes (through switches and routers) limits performance scalability for larger systems.
3. As a result of re-purposing an existing system architecture instead of starting with a custom design tailored to application requirements, the system power efficiency and size are far from optimal.
4. There are no built-in provisions for efficient system management or high availability operation.
Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA): ATCA specifications are a series of PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) specifications which target the requirements for carrier grade communications equipment. The series of specifications incorporates high speed interconnect technologies, processors, and Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS). The Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture is the largest specification effort in the history of the PICMG, with more than 100 companies participating.
The ATCA standard ensures multi-vendor interoperability, offering flexibility in applications. With commitment from top silicon and software vendors, ATCA architectures are deployed worldwide by a wide range of industries that require a chassis-based high-performance computing platform including, for example, telecommunications, cloud services, military, and aerospace.
ATCA provides a means for the telecommunications equipment market to take advantage of standardized, off-the-shelf hardware. It was designed to enable differentiation through application-layer and system level software and offers the following advantages over traditional approaches: shorter time-to-market, increased vendor choice, increased flexibility, multiple supported switch fabrics, user defined I/O, and lower cost.
The architecture is optimized to meet the connectivity requirements of a variety of applications, and typically does so while providing a 99.9999% availability rate. ATCA offers a scalable backplane environment that supports: a variety of standard and proprietary fabric interfaces, robust system management, and superior power and cooling capabilities. Each board in ATCA (up to 16 boards per shelf and 3 shelves per rack) may support up to 200 Watts in a single slot. The power is supplied to each board via redundant −48 VDC feeds. Front and rear cabling is supported for standard 600 mm total depth cabinets, prevalent in Central Office facilities.
Examples of telecommunications and network equipment manufacturers' related ATCA applications and systems include:
1. Wireless Infrastructure Equipment: base stations and radio network controllers, serving gateway support node, gateway GPRS support node, home location register, IP multimedia subsystem servers, media and application servers, media gateways and soft switches.
2. Wireline Networking Equipment: DSLAMs, multi-service switches, media servers, blade servers, and VOIP session controllers.
3. Fiber Optic Networking Equipment.
While the ATCA specification is founded on the requirements of the communications infrastructure, it is extensible to a variety of applications and environments where highly available, highly scalable, cost effective, and open architecture modular solutions are required.
What is needed is a hardware platform that can combine the advantages of FPGAs with the ATCA form factor to address the challenges of telecommunications and network equipment hardware designers.